Indiegogo’s 2012 In Crowdfunding: Campaigns Raised 20% More Than In 2011, With Shorter Funding Periods

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Crowdfunding site Indiegogo shared some exclusive details regarding their past year with TechCrunch, and the stats essentially back up what Matt Burns said about 2012: In many ways, this was the year of crowdfunding. Campaigns raised more money in shorter periods, with fewer people involved in their creation, and more than half met their funding goal.

All told, campaigns launched in 2012 raised 20 percent more than they did on average in 2011, and ran for only 49 days. In 2011, the average campaign not only brought in less cash, but also ran for 60 days, or 22 percent longer. Among successful campaigns in 2012, the funding periods were even shorter: on average, projects that met their goal lasted for only 39 days. This decrease in the time required for a project to meet its goals, coupled with higher funding amounts, pretty clearly points to an increase in the overall comfort level and popularity of crowdfunding with the general population: more funders more eager to donate would definitely lead to this kind of result.

Crowdfunding also appears to have taken a more altruistic turn this past year, as Indiegogo found that 33 percent of the dollars contributed via its platform were given with no strings attached – meaning they either didn’t have a perk attached, or exceeded the amount required to obtain a perk from project creators. In 2011, only 23 percent of dollars gathered by Indiegogo fell into that category. Campaigns were more viral, with 14 percent seeing more referrals from just a single contributor than from the project creator (or creators) themselves, and those seeking funding were more likely to strike out on their own, since the average founding team was made up of just 1.7 people, vs. 2.2 in 2011. Crowdfunding also got more social, with each project getting an average of 42 more shares or Likes on Facebook than they received in the previous year.